Until every page does it and you have to interrupt your flow in order to move your mouse up and click the tiny icon after every single tab load. Plus the wasted bandwidth downloading a bunch of audio that you don't want and are just going to disable immediately anyway.
And then add on the fact that unless all browsers implement similar features, anyone who uses not-Chrome will be at even more of a disadvantage.
I don't know what the solution here is. They obviously don't want to prevent people who listen to music intentionally but I imagine its rather hard to differentiate intentional audio from advertising without the user having to explicitly click a toggle every time or setup a whitelist filter or some such (which I personally do anyway as I've got a bunch of addons to try and prevent the already-annoying video ads from autoplaying all over the damned place, but I recognize the fact that average non-techie types wouldn't really know where to begin with doing something like that.)
Because nothing reduces the need to self-exploit like having to pay off a half million dollar debt.
I'm not saying that having a completely deregulated taxi industry is a good thing either (and I'm usually not one for blind deregulation generally to begin with,) but if you can show that you're a capable driver with a safe vehicle (via annual inspections or whatever,) there's really no reason to restrict you from calling yourself a taxi. Other than protecting the incumbents against competition.
So your preference is for people to rob you to buy your drugs?
Shitty people will be shitty no matter what system you give them. And its been shown many times over that an improved quality of life tends to lower things like drug dependency issues even though the people in question could afford the drugs far more easily.
Not that rich people don't do drugs of course, but they tend to have a purpose in life beyond just getting high and that tempers the effect somewhat (not to mention they can afford better/safer drugs which is why cocaine is a "rich" drug while crack is most definitely not, even though the active ingredient is exactly the same.)
As the GP said, a UBI would, at least in theory, put people who are going to suck under any system the ability to do so a bit further under the radar so that the rest of us can go about our lives in peace. It won't fix everything (and likely nothing will) but it would go a long way toward helping some of the worst things we currently see in society.
Because corporations are people, while (real) people are commodities in our backassedward version of modern capitalism. Thus corporate rights trump personal rights in most cases.
And if your country falls into a depression and "everybody" no longer can afford food, clothing and shelter, suddenly that minimum wage is going to be a very real discussion -- especially if you personally happen to be one of the people who gets the short end of that stick.
Minimum wage is a bandaid to a problem. If you're lucky enough to not have the problem (yet,) you don't need the bandaid (yet.) That doesn't mean you'll always be so lucky and I suggest holding your judgement of things like minimum wage until you've seen what happens when you actually need that kind of bandaid and don't have it.
Thought experiment: You have a city with 100,000 people. That city has 20,000 good-paying jobs and 70,000 minimum wage scrub jobs available.
Explain to me how that last 10,000 even find a job? Or how those 70,000 low-paid workers suddenly find high paying jobs?
Of course that's an extremely simplified scenario but the unfortunate fact of our world is that there's a _lot_ more low paying jobs than there are high paying jobs, and there's a fair number more people than there are total jobs. "Just do better" simply doesn't cut it when you've got a pigeon hole problem at the fundamental level -- even if you manage to get a better job yourself that means, on average across the population, you just kicked someone else down to your prior shitty job.
I mean sure that sounds like a pretty pessimistic view, and in some ways it is, but its also a rather realistic one. The real kicker is that even if you pulled some magic out of your hat and suddenly the new minimum wage was $100k/yr, what you'd find is that the markets will relatively quickly adjust such that $100k is the new definition of "shitty job."
Growing the economy boosts the country in relation to other countries (or your city in relation to other cities or whatever scale you like to talk about) but it doesn't really do much internally because all aspects (again on average across the entire system) tend to grow at approximately the same rate.
The only way that quality of life gets to significantly improve for the people on the bottom is when technology improvements allow specific goods to drop in price relative to the economy's overall inflation rate (which could simply mean staying approximately fixed while inflation continues to increase.)
That's why "adjusted for inflation" is always mentioned when discussing historical prices. That $3000 XT my dad bought for our family back in the mid 80s would be almost $7000 now when adjusted for inflation (http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ using 1985-2016,) and yet we can go out and purchase a machine thousands or millions of times better by all useful metrics for $700. That is, computers have dropped in price by around 90% relative to inflation over that period. That's great if you want to buy a computer! Which is why even people with shitty jobs can afford a basic PC or TV or such these days.
However, during the same period, a Big Mac has gone from about $1.60 to $3.80 on average (http://blog.cwpub.com/post/5179859473/big-mac-inflation) Which tracks much more closely (actually somewhat above) inflation for the same period (that inflation calculator puts it at $3.57.) That is, they can only afford 95% of what they could in 1985 with their inflation-adjusted dollar.
And those are numbers averaged across everybody. And that's the problem -- if everybody just went out and got a better-paying job, the net effect is an inflation on the economy and the entire bar moves up.
And yes, minimum wages and basic incomes and the like have the same inflationary effect, and they need to be constantly adjusted such that they track with inflation (well really the consumer price index, though the CPI itself tracks fairly close to inflation generally.) That's something we've been pretty bad at in many instances so you see cases where minimum wage is say, $5/hr for 15 years and then somebody realizes that its no longer even close to the poverty line and suddenly it becomes $15/hr with little to no warning and businesses get understandably pissed off.
Its much better if minimum wages are setup to track with inflation (required yearly review, or just flat out stated to increase yearly based on the CPI change or something similar.) But few jurisdictions do things like that, preferring to just set a fixed rate that sticks around until someone has an "oh shit" moment and forces a abrupt shift.
And wow, I haven't written a good wall of text like that in a while. Its even mostly on-topic!
There's a significant difference in the purposes of regulation though. In the airline industry, its mostly regulated for safety reasons. Anybody who can show that their plane is up to safety spec is free to start an airline (well from the government's perspective at least -- airport authorities and terminal fees and whatnot are an issue of course but that's not regulation and thus outside of this discussion.)
In the taxi industry on the other hand, the entire purpose of taxi medallions is artificial scarcity. You could get every inspection on the planet done and prove your car is the safest one that ever existed and that you're the best driver in the city, and you still can't start a taxi service unless you buy a medallion.
should I pay a living wage to the kid down he block to mow my lawn or rake leaves...or baby site my kid
Yes, unless you're an ass. There's absolutely no justification for paying them less than at least minimum wage. You're just taking advantage of them if you do.
Of course, you only pay them the hours worked, and its up to them to choose whether or not to work enough hours to make up for a full time job (by cutting multiple peoples' lawns.)
throw in full blown benefits too?
That one not so much. If you have enough lawn to employ a lawnmower full time then benefits are certainly something to consider (since presumably you've got a shitload of other staff at that point as well.) But if you're just hiring them for an hour a week then you should treat them as a contractor rather than an employee.
when did burger flipping become a "real job" instead of something teens did in high school?
Around the time we collectively decided that exploiting children for cheap labor wasn't cool.
when did things change an EVERY job available became one where you were supposed to make a living from and have a career?
Again, around the time that we decided exploiting underprivileged people wasn't really cool. In this case, people who, for one reason or another, are incapable of finding a job better than burger flipping (which includes but is not limited to those high school kids.)
And even then, minimum wage can barely be considered making "a living" in many if not most parts of the country. There are lots of people who have to work 2 or 3 minimum wage jobs just to afford basic food and shelter for themselves and their families. Not because they don't want something better but because something better simply isn't available to them.
That's a justification, not an explanation. That tells me that different Linux distros exist, but I already know that. What I want to know is why I should pick one distro over another? What are the benefits and down sides of each? Does it even matter? And if not, why is there so many distros in the first place?
If you go to buy a laptop at your local Best Buy for example, they have a breakdown of all of the important numbers as well as a price tag. That gives you three entire sets of reasoning a person could use when choosing a laptop: a) Most basic level is price: The higher the price, the higher the quality and/or specs (give or take a branding fee of course. Cough Apple.)
b) Next level: Other numbers. Just assuming higher is better. You'll note that few people put hard drive access times in big font, even for boxed individual drives. Those numbers are probably on the box somewhere but the big bold font is given to the RPM -- because its an easy "bigger is better" metric while still giving some useful indication of access speed.
c) Top level: Actually knowing what those other numbers mean. Not too many people need to deal with this level even if they can, but its available if they want it. If you know you're never going to use this laptop for your video collection for example, you may choose to opt out of the extra tb of hard drive space in order to save money or to get more memory for the same money. Or knowing whether a 500gb SSD is better or worse for your particular usage needs than a 2tb HDD.
Most products in a competitive market have something similar (even in situations where the numbers are kind of meaningless) just so that people who don't have the domain knowledge can still get some judgement as to what they're buying and how it stacks up to the competition. Linux distros just don't have that.
The only measures of any specific Linux distro seems to be "what I'm used to" or "what the cool kids use." And if you're going to use those measures then "Windows" or "Mac" are easier answers for most non-technical people without the whole "what's the difference" confusion.
Basically, one of Linux' main strengths from a FOSS perspective (the ability to freely fork) becomes a bit of a weakness when viewed from a business perspective (brand dilution and lack of obvious distinguishing features between distros.)
make it look easy to administer a system or network
Sounds good up until that point. Decision makers at the top of organizations don't give a rats ass how easy something is to administer -- they hire people to do that for them.
They just want something that works. And they know they can pay somebody to fix it when it doesn't work. Yes, they "paying" part is important! These are people whose entire lives revolve around money and they intrinsically don't trust anything that's free.
And then there's the fragmentation issue. Should they use Redhat or Suse or Yellowdog (wait what?) or Ubuntu or Kubuntu? What's the difference? Explained in phrasing that makes sense to somebody with a degree in Political Science?
Then do you use OpenOffice or LibreOffice or StarOffice? Wait do we still like StarOffice? Why or why not? Will we still like LibreOffice in 3 years? If I pick OpenOffice and I send a doc file to my lawyer, will he see it properly when he loads it up in Word? Or will it have those slight font and margin differences that add up to a completely screwed up layout over the course of an entire document? Will it have them next year when Microsoft releases Office 730? Who do you call to yell at when it doesn't work right? Who do you pay to fix it?
Sure the FOSS crowd can tout their technological superiority and make untested (though likely true) claims of better software security, but they fail horrifically in any sort of business benefits when you get high enough up the org chart that you're dissociated from the technical aspects (and even somewhat from the licensing cost aspects) and are more concerned with the bigger questions of how your business will benefit (even if many of the answers you get from marketroids are misleading or outright false.)
I think perhaps your previous post was missing a word:
Bitcoin will make it harder to collect ransoms
Perhaps that was supposed to be "Banning bitcoin"? Which would make a bit more sense grammatically to boot:P. And of course completely negates the meaning and thus my response!
not too far removed from negotiating with terrorists
There's an enormous gulf between locking someone's data and blowing them up. We tend to be a lot harder on people who murder innocents than those who just steal money (well, as long as its somebody else' money of course.)
physically access a nearly exploit-proof repository
Sure you can access it, but most library usage of the book variety is loan-based since few people want to actually sit in the library for hours on end while reading. And the systems that track the book loans are all computerized these days.
This particular library could potentially lose a handful of books depending on how old their backups were if unscrupulous borrowers figure out that the library's system has "forgotten" them and decide they don't need to return their books. Probably nowhere near $35k worth though.
Except you can't trace it to any particular exchange. I mean if the criminal withdraws exactly $35000 an hour after the library paid them that amount, then sure it becomes (a bit) easier to track.
But if they withdraw it $100 at a time on a weekly basis or something just to cover their living expenses, or if they withdraw it through a Chinese or Russian bitcoin exchange or the such.. there's little that can be done.
For better or worse, Bitcoin was intentionally designed to be untraceable and while there may be the odd weakness that can be exploited, chances are they're not gaping big loopholes or this would have been a solved problem a few years ago when Bitcoin first became the currency of the underground (well "solved" in the sense that the underground would have stopped using it as soon as the flaws were discovered and we'd be having the same conversation about some new scheme.)
Depends who you go to war with. If you just keep bombing essentially defenseless countries in the Middle East "because terrorists" then probably nobody (in the US) will care all that much beyond the profiteers and the occasional family who loses a loved one.
If you go to war with Russia like Clinton seemed to be pushing, or with China or another major power though, everyone should really start caring at all levels of society. Those countries have the power to fight back and do significant damage, even if it doesn't go nuclear.
And no, the nation won't end. He might drive you back into another recession with all his isolationist policies (everyone wants to see car prices jacked up by $15k right? Or do you all just want to work for Mexican-level wages?) but he's got at most 8 years and then you can start clawing your way back out.
Losing a major war to an invading force is about the only way a country can "end" in that short a time period. One guy, even the president, can't do that much damage in 8 years purely via stupid economic policy.
The problem wasn't that he spoke like a Texan, the problem was that he spoke like someone with a mental impairment, particularly at the beginning of his presidency -- very slow speech and slurred words with lots of pauses between phrases.
It was probably some combination of nerves and maybe a bit of a speech impediment though as he got much better by the end. I mean he still didn't say anything super brilliant that I can recall, but at least he sounded much more "normal" when saying it.
Probably mostly dependent on settings, though its possible that Pro has some of the worst ones turned off.
I don't see any of this crap either but then I turn off everything I can find and I use Spybot Anti-beacon to turn off a bunch more stuff that's not as easy to find.
Spybot Anti-beacon. Tools to knock off a bunch of this crap are available as well.
Unfortunately "wasting everyone's time" isn't currently illegal in the same way that "ransoming your own data" is, so adware is and will remain perfectly legal for the foreseeable future, no matter how annoying it is.
There is rules against spam though, suggesting that if the advertisers take it too far we may eventually see some legal restrictions.. I just don't see it happening any time soon.
Heh. They did that when Adobe recently pushed their Reader extension. I don't see why they wouldn't do the same for this one. Unless MS uses their control over OS internals to do an end-around on Chrome.
If they do that though, they're really asking for Google to retaliate in some manner (probably via litigation.) Its even somewhat open whether they'll try to litigate that anyway since MS is starting to tread pretty close to antitrust territory again if they're co-opting third party software to promote their own.
I find it useful. Any time a politician says "believe me," you can stop listening because they're about to spout off a lie that you absolutely shouldn't believe. Its kind of unnecessary to request belief when the truth is obvious.
In practical terms, its a function with thousands or tens of thousands of (typically very non-linear) variables that you're trying to maximize (/minimize.) Its just not plausible for a human to manually search that size of solution space.
Of course there's a limit to it though -- the AI will tend toward local maxima because even the computer doesn't have anywhere near the processing power to find the global maximum in such a space. So you're almost always going to get a heuristically correct answer rather than a truly correct one, but for things like image processing a good heuristic is usually just fine.
Because you're not supposed to look for a job, you're supposed to get a job. Somehow those two concepts don't always get connected in people's minds -- especially the type of people who think anyone can do anything if they just work a little harder, without any consideration for the limitations of an individual or the larger economic issues that they're stuck in.
Basically the assumption is that there's always plenty of well-paying jobs available and its only your own laziness preventing you from getting one and therefore society shouldn't be supporting you at all (or the slightly nicer folk want society to only support your bare minimum needs for basic survival.) You don't need an iPad to help with a job search -- you just need to stop being lazy!
Obviously a single glimpse at reality shows that that's not the case (especially during a recession!) but a lot of folk aren't particularly interested in contemplating or understanding a reality bigger than their own.
There's more to it than that. Learning systems, especially neural nets, are still among our best bets for creating a strong AI. The trouble with them is that they're super computationally expensive.
But computers have gotten a lot faster and now you can easily built "AI" systems with a few hundred to few thousand neurons. Wire them up to well-chosen inputs and outputs and you get AI magic.
So the question is whether we can still consider those systems to be "weak" AI. On one hand, the inputs and outputs you're using aren't "realistic" in the sense that they correspond to some abstract concept space rather than being linked up to sensory and motor neurons but on the other hand, its using many of the same techniques (albeit on a smaller scale) as the "strong" AI systems.
Of course most long-standing applications such as SF are likely still just using a bunch of search trees and expert systems (both of which are definitely in the weak AI category) because changing requires effort and good enough is good enough, but true AI-like systems are poking their heads up in more and more places as the ability to process more and more neurons in near real-time improves.
Slashdot Mirror
Until every page does it and you have to interrupt your flow in order to move your mouse up and click the tiny icon after every single tab load. Plus the wasted bandwidth downloading a bunch of audio that you don't want and are just going to disable immediately anyway.
And then add on the fact that unless all browsers implement similar features, anyone who uses not-Chrome will be at even more of a disadvantage.
I don't know what the solution here is. They obviously don't want to prevent people who listen to music intentionally but I imagine its rather hard to differentiate intentional audio from advertising without the user having to explicitly click a toggle every time or setup a whitelist filter or some such (which I personally do anyway as I've got a bunch of addons to try and prevent the already-annoying video ads from autoplaying all over the damned place, but I recognize the fact that average non-techie types wouldn't really know where to begin with doing something like that.)
Because nothing reduces the need to self-exploit like having to pay off a half million dollar debt.
I'm not saying that having a completely deregulated taxi industry is a good thing either (and I'm usually not one for blind deregulation generally to begin with,) but if you can show that you're a capable driver with a safe vehicle (via annual inspections or whatever,) there's really no reason to restrict you from calling yourself a taxi. Other than protecting the incumbents against competition.
So your preference is for people to rob you to buy your drugs?
Shitty people will be shitty no matter what system you give them. And its been shown many times over that an improved quality of life tends to lower things like drug dependency issues even though the people in question could afford the drugs far more easily.
Not that rich people don't do drugs of course, but they tend to have a purpose in life beyond just getting high and that tempers the effect somewhat (not to mention they can afford better/safer drugs which is why cocaine is a "rich" drug while crack is most definitely not, even though the active ingredient is exactly the same.)
As the GP said, a UBI would, at least in theory, put people who are going to suck under any system the ability to do so a bit further under the radar so that the rest of us can go about our lives in peace. It won't fix everything (and likely nothing will) but it would go a long way toward helping some of the worst things we currently see in society.
Because corporations are people, while (real) people are commodities in our backassedward version of modern capitalism. Thus corporate rights trump personal rights in most cases.
And if your country falls into a depression and "everybody" no longer can afford food, clothing and shelter, suddenly that minimum wage is going to be a very real discussion -- especially if you personally happen to be one of the people who gets the short end of that stick.
Minimum wage is a bandaid to a problem. If you're lucky enough to not have the problem (yet,) you don't need the bandaid (yet.) That doesn't mean you'll always be so lucky and I suggest holding your judgement of things like minimum wage until you've seen what happens when you actually need that kind of bandaid and don't have it.
Thought experiment: You have a city with 100,000 people. That city has 20,000 good-paying jobs and 70,000 minimum wage scrub jobs available.
Explain to me how that last 10,000 even find a job? Or how those 70,000 low-paid workers suddenly find high paying jobs?
Of course that's an extremely simplified scenario but the unfortunate fact of our world is that there's a _lot_ more low paying jobs than there are high paying jobs, and there's a fair number more people than there are total jobs. "Just do better" simply doesn't cut it when you've got a pigeon hole problem at the fundamental level -- even if you manage to get a better job yourself that means, on average across the population, you just kicked someone else down to your prior shitty job.
I mean sure that sounds like a pretty pessimistic view, and in some ways it is, but its also a rather realistic one. The real kicker is that even if you pulled some magic out of your hat and suddenly the new minimum wage was $100k/yr, what you'd find is that the markets will relatively quickly adjust such that $100k is the new definition of "shitty job."
Growing the economy boosts the country in relation to other countries (or your city in relation to other cities or whatever scale you like to talk about) but it doesn't really do much internally because all aspects (again on average across the entire system) tend to grow at approximately the same rate.
The only way that quality of life gets to significantly improve for the people on the bottom is when technology improvements allow specific goods to drop in price relative to the economy's overall inflation rate (which could simply mean staying approximately fixed while inflation continues to increase.)
That's why "adjusted for inflation" is always mentioned when discussing historical prices. That $3000 XT my dad bought for our family back in the mid 80s would be almost $7000 now when adjusted for inflation (http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ using 1985-2016,) and yet we can go out and purchase a machine thousands or millions of times better by all useful metrics for $700. That is, computers have dropped in price by around 90% relative to inflation over that period. That's great if you want to buy a computer! Which is why even people with shitty jobs can afford a basic PC or TV or such these days.
However, during the same period, a Big Mac has gone from about $1.60 to $3.80 on average (http://blog.cwpub.com/post/5179859473/big-mac-inflation) Which tracks much more closely (actually somewhat above) inflation for the same period (that inflation calculator puts it at $3.57.) That is, they can only afford 95% of what they could in 1985 with their inflation-adjusted dollar.
And those are numbers averaged across everybody. And that's the problem -- if everybody just went out and got a better-paying job, the net effect is an inflation on the economy and the entire bar moves up.
And yes, minimum wages and basic incomes and the like have the same inflationary effect, and they need to be constantly adjusted such that they track with inflation (well really the consumer price index, though the CPI itself tracks fairly close to inflation generally.) That's something we've been pretty bad at in many instances so you see cases where minimum wage is say, $5/hr for 15 years and then somebody realizes that its no longer even close to the poverty line and suddenly it becomes $15/hr with little to no warning and businesses get understandably pissed off.
Its much better if minimum wages are setup to track with inflation (required yearly review, or just flat out stated to increase yearly based on the CPI change or something similar.) But few jurisdictions do things like that, preferring to just set a fixed rate that sticks around until someone has an "oh shit" moment and forces a abrupt shift.
And wow, I haven't written a good wall of text like that in a while. Its even mostly on-topic!
There's a significant difference in the purposes of regulation though. In the airline industry, its mostly regulated for safety reasons. Anybody who can show that their plane is up to safety spec is free to start an airline (well from the government's perspective at least -- airport authorities and terminal fees and whatnot are an issue of course but that's not regulation and thus outside of this discussion.)
In the taxi industry on the other hand, the entire purpose of taxi medallions is artificial scarcity. You could get every inspection on the planet done and prove your car is the safest one that ever existed and that you're the best driver in the city, and you still can't start a taxi service unless you buy a medallion.
should I pay a living wage to the kid down he block to mow my lawn or rake leaves...or baby site my kid
Yes, unless you're an ass. There's absolutely no justification for paying them less than at least minimum wage. You're just taking advantage of them if you do.
Of course, you only pay them the hours worked, and its up to them to choose whether or not to work enough hours to make up for a full time job (by cutting multiple peoples' lawns.)
throw in full blown benefits too?
That one not so much. If you have enough lawn to employ a lawnmower full time then benefits are certainly something to consider (since presumably you've got a shitload of other staff at that point as well.) But if you're just hiring them for an hour a week then you should treat them as a contractor rather than an employee.
when did burger flipping become a "real job" instead of something teens did in high school?
Around the time we collectively decided that exploiting children for cheap labor wasn't cool.
when did things change an EVERY job available became one where you were supposed to make a living from and have a career?
Again, around the time that we decided exploiting underprivileged people wasn't really cool. In this case, people who, for one reason or another, are incapable of finding a job better than burger flipping (which includes but is not limited to those high school kids.)
And even then, minimum wage can barely be considered making "a living" in many if not most parts of the country. There are lots of people who have to work 2 or 3 minimum wage jobs just to afford basic food and shelter for themselves and their families. Not because they don't want something better but because something better simply isn't available to them.
That's a justification, not an explanation. That tells me that different Linux distros exist, but I already know that. What I want to know is why I should pick one distro over another? What are the benefits and down sides of each? Does it even matter? And if not, why is there so many distros in the first place?
If you go to buy a laptop at your local Best Buy for example, they have a breakdown of all of the important numbers as well as a price tag. That gives you three entire sets of reasoning a person could use when choosing a laptop:
a) Most basic level is price: The higher the price, the higher the quality and/or specs (give or take a branding fee of course. Cough Apple.)
b) Next level: Other numbers. Just assuming higher is better. You'll note that few people put hard drive access times in big font, even for boxed individual drives. Those numbers are probably on the box somewhere but the big bold font is given to the RPM -- because its an easy "bigger is better" metric while still giving some useful indication of access speed.
c) Top level: Actually knowing what those other numbers mean. Not too many people need to deal with this level even if they can, but its available if they want it. If you know you're never going to use this laptop for your video collection for example, you may choose to opt out of the extra tb of hard drive space in order to save money or to get more memory for the same money. Or knowing whether a 500gb SSD is better or worse for your particular usage needs than a 2tb HDD.
Most products in a competitive market have something similar (even in situations where the numbers are kind of meaningless) just so that people who don't have the domain knowledge can still get some judgement as to what they're buying and how it stacks up to the competition. Linux distros just don't have that.
The only measures of any specific Linux distro seems to be "what I'm used to" or "what the cool kids use." And if you're going to use those measures then "Windows" or "Mac" are easier answers for most non-technical people without the whole "what's the difference" confusion.
Basically, one of Linux' main strengths from a FOSS perspective (the ability to freely fork) becomes a bit of a weakness when viewed from a business perspective (brand dilution and lack of obvious distinguishing features between distros.)
make it look easy to administer a system or network
Sounds good up until that point. Decision makers at the top of organizations don't give a rats ass how easy something is to administer -- they hire people to do that for them.
They just want something that works. And they know they can pay somebody to fix it when it doesn't work. Yes, they "paying" part is important! These are people whose entire lives revolve around money and they intrinsically don't trust anything that's free.
And then there's the fragmentation issue. Should they use Redhat or Suse or Yellowdog (wait what?) or Ubuntu or Kubuntu? What's the difference? Explained in phrasing that makes sense to somebody with a degree in Political Science?
Then do you use OpenOffice or LibreOffice or StarOffice? Wait do we still like StarOffice? Why or why not? Will we still like LibreOffice in 3 years? If I pick OpenOffice and I send a doc file to my lawyer, will he see it properly when he loads it up in Word? Or will it have those slight font and margin differences that add up to a completely screwed up layout over the course of an entire document? Will it have them next year when Microsoft releases Office 730? Who do you call to yell at when it doesn't work right? Who do you pay to fix it?
Sure the FOSS crowd can tout their technological superiority and make untested (though likely true) claims of better software security, but they fail horrifically in any sort of business benefits when you get high enough up the org chart that you're dissociated from the technical aspects (and even somewhat from the licensing cost aspects) and are more concerned with the bigger questions of how your business will benefit (even if many of the answers you get from marketroids are misleading or outright false.)
I think perhaps your previous post was missing a word:
Bitcoin will make it harder to collect ransoms
Perhaps that was supposed to be "Banning bitcoin"? Which would make a bit more sense grammatically to boot :P. And of course completely negates the meaning and thus my response!
not too far removed from negotiating with terrorists
There's an enormous gulf between locking someone's data and blowing them up. We tend to be a lot harder on people who murder innocents than those who just steal money (well, as long as its somebody else' money of course.)
physically access a nearly exploit-proof repository
Sure you can access it, but most library usage of the book variety is loan-based since few people want to actually sit in the library for hours on end while reading. And the systems that track the book loans are all computerized these days.
This particular library could potentially lose a handful of books depending on how old their backups were if unscrupulous borrowers figure out that the library's system has "forgotten" them and decide they don't need to return their books. Probably nowhere near $35k worth though.
Except you can't trace it to any particular exchange. I mean if the criminal withdraws exactly $35000 an hour after the library paid them that amount, then sure it becomes (a bit) easier to track.
But if they withdraw it $100 at a time on a weekly basis or something just to cover their living expenses, or if they withdraw it through a Chinese or Russian bitcoin exchange or the such.. there's little that can be done.
For better or worse, Bitcoin was intentionally designed to be untraceable and while there may be the odd weakness that can be exploited, chances are they're not gaping big loopholes or this would have been a solved problem a few years ago when Bitcoin first became the currency of the underground (well "solved" in the sense that the underground would have stopped using it as soon as the flaws were discovered and we'd be having the same conversation about some new scheme.)
peopleofwalmart.com will riot. It won't be pretty.
You need to have more faith in your president! I'm sure he can screw up that badly!
Who gives a flying fuck about a war?
Depends who you go to war with. If you just keep bombing essentially defenseless countries in the Middle East "because terrorists" then probably nobody (in the US) will care all that much beyond the profiteers and the occasional family who loses a loved one.
If you go to war with Russia like Clinton seemed to be pushing, or with China or another major power though, everyone should really start caring at all levels of society. Those countries have the power to fight back and do significant damage, even if it doesn't go nuclear.
And no, the nation won't end. He might drive you back into another recession with all his isolationist policies (everyone wants to see car prices jacked up by $15k right? Or do you all just want to work for Mexican-level wages?) but he's got at most 8 years and then you can start clawing your way back out.
Losing a major war to an invading force is about the only way a country can "end" in that short a time period. One guy, even the president, can't do that much damage in 8 years purely via stupid economic policy.
The problem wasn't that he spoke like a Texan, the problem was that he spoke like someone with a mental impairment, particularly at the beginning of his presidency -- very slow speech and slurred words with lots of pauses between phrases.
It was probably some combination of nerves and maybe a bit of a speech impediment though as he got much better by the end. I mean he still didn't say anything super brilliant that I can recall, but at least he sounded much more "normal" when saying it.
Probably mostly dependent on settings, though its possible that Pro has some of the worst ones turned off.
I don't see any of this crap either but then I turn off everything I can find and I use Spybot Anti-beacon to turn off a bunch more stuff that's not as easy to find.
Spybot Anti-beacon. Tools to knock off a bunch of this crap are available as well.
Unfortunately "wasting everyone's time" isn't currently illegal in the same way that "ransoming your own data" is, so adware is and will remain perfectly legal for the foreseeable future, no matter how annoying it is.
There is rules against spam though, suggesting that if the advertisers take it too far we may eventually see some legal restrictions.. I just don't see it happening any time soon.
Heh. They did that when Adobe recently pushed their Reader extension. I don't see why they wouldn't do the same for this one. Unless MS uses their control over OS internals to do an end-around on Chrome.
If they do that though, they're really asking for Google to retaliate in some manner (probably via litigation.) Its even somewhat open whether they'll try to litigate that anyway since MS is starting to tread pretty close to antitrust territory again if they're co-opting third party software to promote their own.
No, they're just 90% of everything else most people do.
I find it useful. Any time a politician says "believe me," you can stop listening because they're about to spout off a lie that you absolutely shouldn't believe. Its kind of unnecessary to request belief when the truth is obvious.
In pure theoretical terms, its not.
In practical terms, its a function with thousands or tens of thousands of (typically very non-linear) variables that you're trying to maximize (/minimize.) Its just not plausible for a human to manually search that size of solution space.
Of course there's a limit to it though -- the AI will tend toward local maxima because even the computer doesn't have anywhere near the processing power to find the global maximum in such a space. So you're almost always going to get a heuristically correct answer rather than a truly correct one, but for things like image processing a good heuristic is usually just fine.
Because you're not supposed to look for a job, you're supposed to get a job. Somehow those two concepts don't always get connected in people's minds -- especially the type of people who think anyone can do anything if they just work a little harder, without any consideration for the limitations of an individual or the larger economic issues that they're stuck in.
Basically the assumption is that there's always plenty of well-paying jobs available and its only your own laziness preventing you from getting one and therefore society shouldn't be supporting you at all (or the slightly nicer folk want society to only support your bare minimum needs for basic survival.) You don't need an iPad to help with a job search -- you just need to stop being lazy!
Obviously a single glimpse at reality shows that that's not the case (especially during a recession!) but a lot of folk aren't particularly interested in contemplating or understanding a reality bigger than their own.
There's more to it than that. Learning systems, especially neural nets, are still among our best bets for creating a strong AI. The trouble with them is that they're super computationally expensive.
But computers have gotten a lot faster and now you can easily built "AI" systems with a few hundred to few thousand neurons. Wire them up to well-chosen inputs and outputs and you get AI magic.
So the question is whether we can still consider those systems to be "weak" AI. On one hand, the inputs and outputs you're using aren't "realistic" in the sense that they correspond to some abstract concept space rather than being linked up to sensory and motor neurons but on the other hand, its using many of the same techniques (albeit on a smaller scale) as the "strong" AI systems.
Of course most long-standing applications such as SF are likely still just using a bunch of search trees and expert systems (both of which are definitely in the weak AI category) because changing requires effort and good enough is good enough, but true AI-like systems are poking their heads up in more and more places as the ability to process more and more neurons in near real-time improves.